Web On The Piste

Last year at WOTP I posted about the Web Jam and the Dystro/ Glenn stuff.

This year it was fun to head back to Queenstown and reflex on another years worth of development on our RIA platforms.

It was fantastic to team up with Michael Kordahi DG for the first time at an event.

There was a strong team representing the MS side of the house thanks to Tatham Oddie, Jose Fajardo and Chris Auld for their top notch sessions.

Surprisingly the conference was both more developer and UX focused than last year steering clear of media and interface design.

Without Matt Voerman and Scott Barnes in attendance this year the Blue v Red aspect of the Microsoft/ Adobe panel discussion didn't have quite the venom. Pip from Gruden commented on the WOTP blog...

"Great panel discussion yesterday evening, Microsoft and Adobe playing (marginally) happily together for a great session"

I'm looking forward for this to go online so I can remember what I actually said!

Michael delivered a killer keynote on the second day which should also be up on the web on the piste website shortly. He had prepared it previously for the Australia partner conference and it was the perfect fit for this conference as well.

Chris introduced the Runtime Page Optimizer that the actionthis.com team has built. RPO drops into the integrated pipeline in IIS7 to dynamically perform yslow optimizations on a web site at runtime. It does this by combining .js, css into single files and builds out css sprites. If you are hosting on Windows from New Zealand I highly recommend taking the beta for a spin as it vastly improves latency for your ASP.NET or PHP website.

Speaking of Web Servers I am also very impressed with Tatham's ability to demonstrate PHP running on IIS7 using FastCGI, then integrating with an ASP.NET application before finally load balancing the whole application between two servers in a high availability, automatic failover cluster all in less than 8 minutes, check out his screencast!

My webjam this year was to build a panoramic deepzoom of Queenstown and I only used half of the 5 minutes allocated!

Check out the screencast below of the steps involved and download the August update of deepzoom composer to try it out for yourself.

Both mine and Michael's resulting panoramic deepzooms are below.

Also I created a Queenstown Photosynth as well.

Paul Lo did a great job as roaming reporter for the event a produced the following video...

I'll also leave you with a couple of episodes of DG TV from the event.

See you at Tech.Ed next week.